The search server is terminally overloaded (load average over 100, last I looked), and it was taking down the main web site with it. Therefore for now I’ve had to change mb_server to show a simple error message instead of running the search.

First a little about the history of CotM for those who don’t know what it is:

Some time ago, a bunch of us got together and thought that it would be a good idea to have a “Collaboration of the Month”, a collaborative effort to clean up one (1) artist each month. [mdhowe] was the chef idea champion then and soon both a wikipage and a forum post where created.
The first (and very successfull one at that) CotM was “The Beatles”
It got cleaned up real good (should probably have its quality setting set to high, actually..)
Next up was the Dire Straits, got a decent overhaul, but however something went wrong with the election of a new artist for CotM, and DS sorta dragged its ass and ended up staying on the page for over two months.

Don’t be afraid if you don’t find anything to do, just adding correct ASINs or even just *voting* is help, you can also help by documenting good links for others in the wikipage.
Do you own any Bob Marley etc. releases? please add TOCs and label info :)

It has also be contested that perhaps Collaboration of the Month is BadTerminology.
Therefor, after that discussion, I set up a votable string for either “keep as is”, “change to ‘Cleanup of the Month'” or “other” on the [main CotM-page]: if you’ve got some time and an opinionated soul, head on over and vote :)

In closing:

Thanks for now, and sorry for the delay. I’ll be making these posts regularly whenever we’ve decided the collab(cleanup) has been sufficiently finished and a new one picked (either by consensus of vote, or by me (as we didn’t have enough people for a vote previously)
Finally please add your pet peeve or idea to the list and or vote for what month you’d like ’em in.
Freso already said June would be great for “The Dubliners” and (unless someone can come up with why not) I see no reason not to continue with that after Bob and his cats. Thank you.

Recently our search server hit a magical 2GB limit on search index sizes and consequently we’ve got a corrupted track search index. We’re in the process of building a new one, but the process takes about 7.5 hours. So, we will not have track searches or taglookup functionality (for tracks) for the next 7-8 hours. I anticipate having this fixed around 22:00 PDT (6:00UTC).

I apologize for the inconvenience.

(And, sorry no, the mirror server won’t help since that relies on the main search server server too)

Our move to the shiny new Sun server is finally complete! I’m pleased to announce that the new server is largely bored with the traffic we’re throwing at it right now — which is exactly what I had hoped for. This gives us a lot of room to grow our database.

Tomorrow at 2000UTC (1300 PDT, 1500 EDT, 2100BST, 2200MET) we’re going to finally rotate the new Sun server into active service. We’re expecting MusicBrainz to be unavailable for about 90 minutes while we dump the database from our old server and import it to the new server.

We’ve got the new database server finally ready to roll, except for one thing: We don’t know how to monitor the hardware RAID array.

Under Linux we would use mpt-status, but this doesn’t work for Solaris. Does anyone know how to get Solaris to tell us about the state of the hardware RAID array? If one of the drives in the array goes away, we want to know about it as soon as possible.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated!

UPDATE: Our very own inhouseuk had the answer: raidctl — a utility that was installed all along!